Covach, Schoenberg's Turn to An

Volume 1, Number 5, September 1995 Copyright © 1995 Society for Music Theory John R. Covach KEYWORDS: aesthetics, atonality, Goethe, Heidegger, musical worlding, mysticism, Schoenberg, Schopenhauer, Steiner, Swedenborg ABSTRACT: The present paper constitutes an extension of an earlier article in this journal.(1) Building on the notion of musical worlding introduced in that essay, I explore Schoenberg’s turn to atonality in the period of 1908 and after. I argue that Schoenberg employs atonality as a means of disrupting tonality in order to create an “other” world; this otherness is created by opening up a tension between the world of the “great German tonal masterworks” and the particular atonal piece. Schoenberg’s fascination with other worlds is explored, and atonality is cast as a technical solution to an aesthetic problem that runs throughout Schoenberg’s music and thought: how to represent the spiritual essence of music. Introduction Ich fuehle luft von anderem planeten —Stefan George, “Entrueckung” Schoenberg is endeavoring to make complete use of his freedom and has already discovered gold mines of new beauty in his search for spiritual harmony. His music leads us into a realm where musical experience is a matter not of the ear but of the soul alone—and from this point of view begins the music of the future. —Wassily Kandinsky (1911) [1] In the third and fourth movements of his Second String Quartet of 1907–8, Arnold Schoenberg sets texts by Stefan George, adding a soprano to the traditional four string instruments. As is well known, Schoenberg does not provide a key signature for the last movement, and many writers have taken this as an indication of the composer’s turn to atonality. Recalling this period much later in his life (1949), however, Schoenberg points out that throughout all the movements of Op. 10 “the key is presented distinctly at all the main dividing-points of the formal organization.”(2) Still, the combination of Schoenberg’s (subsequent) turn to atonality and the George text referring to the “air of other planets” has been too much for many writers to resist. [2] Viewing his turn to atonality in the period around 1908–9 some years after the event, Schoenberg tended to emphasize 1 of 11 the ways in which his atonal music extended the great German musical tradition. With an almost Hegelian faith in the inevitable forward progress of history, Schoenberg tended to view his rejection of tonality as a natural development of the tonal language itself, playing down the idea that atonality constituted a radical turning point in the history of Western art music. By contrast, Carl Dahlhaus has challenged the notion that atonality forms a necessary continuation of tonal music and questions whether Schoenberg’s turn to atonality was really as historically inevitable as Schoenberg later tended to portray it.(3) [3] This article explores Schoenberg’s turn to atonality by employing an interpretive perspective adapted from philosophical hermeneutics. Working from Martin Heidegger’s notion of fundamental ontology,(4) I propose that one way pieces of music are meaningful is in a particular work’s relation to other works within some group of works. For example, pieces of tonal music in the German tradition—the canonical works of eighteenth and nineteenth century in which Schoenberg was so interested—form a kind of “community” of works. When one considers a single piece, one considers it within the context of this community of other related works. Even if one considers only the characteristic features of a single work, the exceptional features of the specific work will have to arise by a comparison with other pieces that are somehow related to it, even if this occurs only implicitly. Thus, it is almost impossible to consider any piece of tonal music in isolation from other works, and every analysis or experience of some work invokes the other works in the canon. In this way, the listener or analyst “situates” a work within the context created by its tradition, and meaning is thought of as arising not only within the work itself, but also from its relation to other works. [4] I will argue that Schoenberg’s turn to atonality was essentially an attempt to write music that could not be situated in traditional ways within the tonal world of the “great masterworks.” If the canon of eighteenth and nineteenth-century tonal works can be thought of as a kind of “musical world” in which the individual pieces that make it up are variously situated, rejecting tonality had the effect of casting these atonal pieces into a novel relationship with the musical world of the masterworks—one in which the traditional inter-opus relations are no longer valid but in which these connections still form the basis for musical understanding and meaning in a radically transformed way; meaning is created by an inability to situate a work in the expected and traditional manner. Each atonal work thus resides outside of the musical world of the canonical tonal works—in a kind of “other” musical world—while simultaneously relying on that tonal world for its effect. [5] Thought of in this manner, the interpretive question with regard to Schoenberg’s turn to atonality changes significantly. Rather than exploring how atonality constitutes an extension of turn-of-the-century tonal practice (or even how it constitutes an anticipation of the twelve-tone method), one might instead explore why Schoenberg may have felt compelled to seek an “other” world. I will argue that atonality is meaningful precisely because of its difference from tonality—a difference that creates an aesthetically crucial disruption of tonal practice. A consideration of the many texts Schoenberg used in his works during this period, as well as the literary and philosophical texts that seem to have exerted some influence on his thinking about music, reveals a strong fascination with “other” worlds of various types. Atonality is thus posited as a technical solution to broader aesthetic and philosophical problems that occupied Schoenberg during this period, and indeed, throughout his career. [6] In pursuing these issues, this study will first briefly review an application of Martin Heidegger’s fundamental ontology to musical experience, focussing especially on the notion of “musical worlding.” I will then consider and summarize Schoenberg’s fascination with the mystical notion that music can provide a glimpse of an “other,” higher realm of existence. These ideas can be traced in part to Arthur Schopenhauer’s “metaphysics of music,” but also in part to Honore de Balzac’s philosophical novels (which were influenced by Emanuel Swedenborg’s theology). Schoenberg’s awareness of Goethean science was almost certainly influenced in at least an indirect way by Rudolf Steiner’s writing. I will then review well-known accounts of Schoenberg’s turn to atonality (Schoenberg, Adorno, Dahlhaus, Forte). I will argue that recovering the aesthetic impact of Schoenberg’s atonal music requires one to situate each particular piece with regard to the musical world of the German tonal tradition, but to situate it outside of that tradition. Musical Worlding(5) [7] In his important book, Being and Time of 1927, Martin Heidegger argues that the Western philosophical tradition since the time of Plato has operated under a number of assumptions that have become tacit, but that none the less determine the ways 2 of 11 in which we think about crucial philosophical questions. One assumption that Heidegger examines is what is often termed the “Cartesian subject-object split.” This means that in our daily lives we tend to divide our experience into an inside (our thinking selves as subjects) and an outside (objects in an external world). Transferred into the musical realm, the subject- object split refers to the separation that occurs—however tacitly—whenever we approach a piece of music as an object in some world “out there,” an object distinct from ourselves as perceiving and/or conceiving subjects. It is probably safe to say that in our analysis of works we tend to assume this subject-object distinction; while we are mostly not at all clear on what the specific nature of the musical object is, we nevertheless proceed as if that problem can be “bracketed” in analytical discussion. [8] Following Heidegger’s model of “fundamental ontology,” and thus in an attempt to “de-structure” our assumptions about how meaning arises in the musical experience, I have argued that particular pieces of music are situated within what I term “musical worlds.” The musical world of a piece is a number of other works that form a kind of background—a body of other pieces that create a purely musical context for some particular piece. The musical world of a piece is the product of our cumulative experience in music, and is usually not something of which we are consciously aware as we listen. The exact pieces that make up a musical world could never be exhaustively listed; in a certain sense they are what is closest to us in our musical experience, but by virtue of this they are also what is most difficult to articulate in a conscious manner: musical worlds are transparent. [9] At the most fundamental level, we do not experience a piece of music as a self-contained object. It is rather more like a location within a rich network of other pieces in our musical experience. Musical understanding arises when we are able to situate a particular piece within such a musical world, and musical meaning arises as we appreciate the particular way in which the work is situated. Thought of in this way, the work is not so much an isolated point as much as it is a location of gathering together.

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